The Town With the Most Boring Name: The Real 'Gravity Falls' Is in Oregon — But Nothing There Looks Like the Show
Even the biggest fans probably wouldn’t want to visit.
Here’s a fun little fact I found out recently — and as someone who still thinks about Gravity Falls now and then, I had to share it. Turns out, the show’s real-world inspiration is very real… and very boring. Literally.
Gravity Falls has a real-life prototype — and it’s called Boring. There’s a town in Oregon with that exact name. Alex Hirsch, the show’s creator, spotted it on a road sign while traveling through the state back in 2016. He said he never actually went there, but the idea of a town with such a gloomy name seemed weirdly charming.
That’s how the universe was born — a place where all things strange, paranormal, and slightly ridiculous come together in one animated dot on the map.
But the town in the show isn’t Boring. It’s a mashup of places Hirsch visited as a kid: national parks, roadside attractions like the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz or the Oregon Vortex, a little Portland, and a lot of forest legends.
The real Boring is a quiet town with around 8,000 people. No gnomes. No dinosaurs. Not even a hint of Bill Cipher. But it still ended up being the accidental opposite of the fictional place where Dipper and Mabel spend their unforgettable summer.
